Eamonn O’Kane looking to improve after beating Lewis Taylor

Eamonn O’Kane knows improvement must be made if he is to get his hands on the IBF middleweight World title.

O’Kane moved himself up to number 3 in the IBF rankings after Saturday’s majourity points victory against Lewis Taylor at the Lavey Centre.

The judges at the Inter-continental title contest gave O’Kane the win with scores of 114-114, 116-112 and 115-113 and ‘King Kane’ believes something was missing from his peformance.

“I didn’t feel the usual spark. I’ve been sparring cruiserweights, world class super-middleweights like George Groves for 13-15 rounds but tonight it didn’t seem like the usual Eamonn O’Kane was there.

“The occasion would be a good excuse to use but I can’t use it. I just feel like I couldn’t get out of the blocks.

“His style was just clashing with mine, he was just nullifying what I was doing – I maybe was closing the gap too much and he was closing the gap and we ended up just hugging each other most of the time.

“But I think I let the quality combinations go when I let them go and I let the bigger shots go and that was the telling fact of the fight.”

After beating Taylor, O’Kane will be ranked highly by the IBF and he believes there are a number of huge fights out there for him.

“I’ll be shunted up the ratings now, there’s talk about me going up to number three in the world. I’d need to be better than that to fight Hassan N’Dam or David Lemieux (who fight for the vacant IBF ttitle) but I’ll go away, I’ll scrutinise myself and I’ll be better the next day.